Obesity is the biggest preventable cause of cancer in the UK after smoking. More than one in 20 cancer cases are caused by excess body weight, according to Cancer Research UK. Experts already suspect that fat sends signals to the body that can cause growth and damage to cells, resulting in cancer.

Now the team at Trinity have found another pathway that could explain the obesity-cancer link. Too much fat in the body can clog some of the body's cancer-fighting cells, according to the new work published in Nature Immunology journal.

By doing tests on these 'natural killer' cells in their lab, the researchers were able to pinpoint the steps that led to the clogging. Armed with this knowledge, they hope to be able to find drug treatments that could restore the cancer-fighting abilities of natural killer cells.